Summer Academy — Coding Bootcamp Week 1

Today nearly marks the close of our first week of Summer Academy (still a half day tomorrow). It’s been pretty intense. Monday I tried to get most of my week’s work done for my Coursera Processing course before and after a social get-together at the home of one of the course’s organizers, Nicole Belanger. It was Canada day, so driving in to downtown Ottawa seemed out of the question. My husband Ahmed and I (we’re taking the course together) took a bus partway, and then ended up walking across the Alexandria bridge (and later back) because we didn’t find the shuttle. (Walking through the Canada day crowds was about the closest I’ve gotten to Canada day celebrations, after over a decade in Canada, and probably as close as I want to get). It ended up being way more walking than I’ve done since January, because of a foot injury, but with many short and long stops, to my surprise and delight it went well. We had a nice time meeting our classmates and coordinators/teachers. Back home a Coursera course that I had been awaiting for months just opened (Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Computer Science Applications), and I took a peek. I got sucked in by the idea of applying a fun language (Python) to a favorite subject (Linear Algebra), installed the latest version of Python, and started doing some of the first exercises.

Tuesday, wide awake at 7am (early for me, but still a bit on Rome time from our visit to my parents), messed around with the Coursera courses, and got ready for Day 1 of Summer Academy. We kicked off at 1pm with a couple of hours of fun team-building get-to-know-each-other exercises and then got to work with installing a “VirtualBox” on each of our machines — a virtual computer inside a computer that would ensure that all of us, whether on pc or mac, would be working with Rails, Ruby, Git, and so on, in identical versions. While waiting a few hours for everything to download and install, we watched, in small groups, a long video about Unix and its commands in fairly grueling detail, at least as far as we were concerned. We developed a good camaraderie with the people sharing our table (we’re working in a big open space, the lounge/cafeteria of Shopify, and clump up in groups of 6 to 10). Years of being an artist working at home have intensified my introverted nature to the point of sometimes being painfully shy with strangers, so I was happy to see I found it relatively easy and quick to start bonding with my fellow classmates. I’m pretty impressed by what a diverse collection of bright, friendly, enthusiastic people HackerYou has put together.

We took a break for dinner then had an interactive evening lecture where we built our first practice Rails app. It was a pretty tough day, especially physically — I’m completely unused to sitting in place and working for more or less 8 hours straight — I generally work both day and evening, but intersperse sitting there working with lots of breaks moving around or lying down. Home at 10pm, doing a bit of exhausted and perfunctory work on the Coursera courses.

Wednesday, a 10-6 day, again felt long and hard, even if we were let out early around 5. Gorgeous catered lunch though. We mixed individual undirected work on our Rails apps (I paraphrase, “do something cool with Rails Time methods”) with git tutorial, git practice and more git tutorial. There seems always to be more work than one can really cover in the set time, which makes some logical sense — you wouldn’t want anyone to run out of things to do and twiddle their thumbs — but since none of the work is labeled optional, a person like me, who is used to being able to finish everything assigned, and fairly easily at that, feels some confusion and frustration.

We were invited to volunteer to demo our Rails apps, and I was one of about a third of the class who raised their hands. But I chickened out after seeing the visually impressive apps that some of my classmates demo’d. I had focused on pure code, setting up a hash to display the time in 39 cities around the world without copy-pasting code, and doing various other calculations with Rails time functions. But now it seemed so boring in black and white! (I had briefly thought about how to at least make colored text, but I was stumped and soon turned to back to the tons of Git tutorials we were also supposed to be doing). Afterwards I was kicking myself for being a chicken. Ahmed asked me if he should have pushed me to present…but no, I said, I wouldn’t have wanted that either…

We went home, burnt out, and relaxed for a while. I then took a hard look at the Coursera courses, dropped the Linear Algebra one, and resolved to finish up the Processing one (too relevant to my work, and too much work already invested, to drop it) in minimal style instead of the usual maximal.

Thursday, not surprisingly, just as I was getting used to our table mates, whoops, the instructions were to switch it up. Ahmed was going to go sit away from me but I really wasn’t ready… We did though sit with several new people at a new table and I got to learn that they were just as friendly as the first set. Another packed and demanding day of doing Ruby tutorials, exercises, part of more reading on Ruby (we were supposed to read all of it but just couldn’t finish it all), and then an interesting lecture on recreating Rails using Sinatra that got really tough for most of us to follow at the end…home at 10:30.

Friday we did a day (short! 10 to 4, the first day that I didn’t feel exhausted afterwards…) of quiz and exercise content in “student-teacher” pairs. We were asked to walk to one side of the room if we felt we needed more help mastering the basic, core content of the week, and to the other side if we felt ready to help a colleague master that content. I didn’t really feel uncomfortable with the basic content, but nor did I feel really confident enough to “teach” it. But I walked to the “teacher” side, which was probably best, since the instructor ended up needing to ask a few people from the “student” side to switch over. We then paired up randomly, and I ended up with Kate Hudson. She was pretty close to my level, so I had a light job, and we made pretty quick progress with the quiz content, and practice with git forking, pull requests and so on (the practice of which was equally new to both of us, we had both only seen it in theory so far). After our lunch break, we attacked the programming exercises, and here happily I was able to feel more useful as the teaching partner. We finished our first exercise fairly quickly, ahead of most of the class, and our instructor Heather asked us to demo the program. That went well, and I felt redeemed.

Finally, for fun, here is the link to my nearly marks the close of our first week of Summer Academy (still a half day tomorrow). It’s been pretty intense. Monday I tried to get most of my week’s work done for my Coursera Processing course before and after a social get-together at the home of one of the course’s organizers, Nicole Belanger. It was Canada day, so driving in to downtown Ottawa seemed out of the question. My husband Ahmed and I (we’re taking the course together) took a bus partway, and then ended up walking across the Alexandria bridge (and later back) because we didn’t find the shuttle. (Walking through the Canada day crowds was about the closest I’ve gotten to Canada day celebrations, after over a decade in Canada, and probably as close as I want to get). It ended up being way more walking than I’ve done since January, because of a foot injury, but with many short and long stops, to my surprise and delight it went well. We had a nice time meeting our classmates and coordinators/teachers. Back home a Coursera course that I had been awaiting for months just opened (Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Computer Science Applications), and I took a peek. I got sucked in by the idea of applying a fun language (Python) to a favorite subject (Linear Algebra), installed the latest version of Python, and started doing some of the first exercises.

Tuesday, wide awake at 7am (early for me, but still a bit on Rome time from our visit to my parents), messed around with the Coursera courses, and got ready for Day 1 of Summer Academy. We kicked off at 1pm with a couple of hours of fun team-building get-to-know-each-other exercises and then got to work with installing a “VirtualBox” on each of our machines — a virtual computer inside a computer that would ensure that all of us, whether on pc or mac, would be working with Rails, Ruby, Git, and so on, in identical versions. While waiting a few hours for everything to download and install, we watched, in small groups, a long video about Unix and its commands in fairly grueling detail, at least as far as we were concerned. We developed a good camaraderie with the people sharing our table (we’re working in a big open space, the lounge/cafeteria of Shopify, and clump up in groups of 6 to 10). Years of being an artist working at home have intensified my introverted nature to the point of sometimes being painfully shy with strangers, so I was happy to see I found it relatively easy and quick to start bonding with my fellow classmates. I’m pretty impressed by what a diverse collection of bright, friendly, enthusiastic people HackerYou has put together.

We took a break for dinner then had an interactive evening lecture where we built our first practice Rails app. It was a pretty tough day, especially physically — I’m completely unused to sitting in place and working for more or less 8 hours straight — I generally work both day and evening, but intersperse sitting there working with lots of breaks moving around or lying down. Home at 10pm, doing a bit of exhausted and perfunctory work on the Coursera courses.

Wednesday, a 10-6 day, again felt long and hard, even if we were let out early around 5. Gorgeous catered lunch though. We mixed individual undirected work on our Rails apps (I paraphrase, “do something cool with Rails Time methods”) with git tutorial, git practice and more git tutorial. There seems always to be more work than one can really cover in the set time, which makes some logical sense — you wouldn’t want anyone to run out of things to do and twiddle their thumbs — but since none of the work is labeled optional, a person like me, who is used to being able to finish everything assigned, and fairly easily at that, feels some confusion and frustration.

We were invited to volunteer to demo our Rails apps, and I was one of about a third of the class who raised their hands. But I chickened out after seeing the visually impressive apps that some of my classmates demo’d. I had focused on pure code, setting up a hash to display the time in 39 cities around the world without copy-pasting code, and doing various other calculations with Rails time functions. But now it seemed so boring in black and white! (I had briefly thought about how to at least make colored text, but I was stumped and soon turned to back to the tons of Git tutorials we were also supposed to be doing). Afterwards I was kicking myself for being a chicken. Ahmed asked me if he should have pushed me to present…but no, I said, I wouldn’t have wanted that either…

We went home, burnt out, and relaxed for a while. I then took a hard look at the Coursera courses, dropped the Linear Algebra one, and resolved to finish up the Processing one (too relevant to my work, and too much work already invested, to drop it) in minimal style instead of the usual maximal.

Thursday, not surprisingly, just as I was getting used to our table mates, whoops, the instructions were to switch it up. Ahmed was going to go sit away from me but I really wasn’t ready… We did though sit with several new people at a new table and I got to learn that they were just as friendly as the first set. Another packed and demanding day of doing Ruby tutorials, exercises, part of more reading on Ruby (we were supposed to read all of it but just couldn’t finish it all), and then an interesting lecture on recreating Rails using Sinatra that got really tough for most of us to follow at the end…home at 10:30.

Friday we did a day (short! 10 to 4, the first day that I didn’t feel exhausted afterwards…) of quiz and exercise content in “student-teacher” pairs. We were asked to walk to one side of the room if we felt we needed more help mastering the basic, core content of the week, and to the other side if we felt ready to help a colleague master that content. I didn’t really feel uncomfortable with the basic content, but nor did I feel really confident enough to “teach” it. But I walked to the “teacher” side, which was probably best, since the instructor ended up needing to ask a few people from the “student” side to switch over. We then paired up randomly, and I ended up with Kate Hudson. She was pretty close to my level, so I had a light job, and we made pretty quick progress with the quiz content, and practice with git forking, pull requests and so on (the practice of which was equally new to both of us, we had both only seen it in theory so far). After our lunch break, we attacked the programming exercises, and here happily I was able to feel more useful as the teaching partner. We finished our first exercise fairly quickly, ahead of most of the class, and our instructor Heather asked us to demo the program. That went well, and I felt redeemed.

Finally, for fun, here is the link to my first project from the Processing course.

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